Week went from go to woe for Doyle

An election campaign that began under the camouflage of the Melbourne Cup ends today with the major combatants arguing over the size of Labor's expected winning majority.

It has been a strange and testing campaign for a media starved of weighty issues and strong political identities.

After Jeff Kennett's mugging by rural and regional Victoria in 1999, this campaign was always going to be different. It has been fought seat by seat, with over-arching themes underlined by targeted media messages from political parties driven by cautious men and women.

Mr Kennett's departure signalled a decline in conviction politics. The new breed of Victorian politician seeks to act as a competent manager rather than draw a bold vision. Damage limitation is the mantra.

Sadly, for the Liberals, serious damage was done to its campaign by the Robert Dean episode. And just when Robert Doyle was gaining some momentum with industrial relations, his chosen weapon for the final week, his campaign was damaged by clumsy handling of his party's hard-hitting IR ads painting Victoria as a hotbed of union unrest.");document.write("

advertisement

");
}
}
// -->

It was unforgivable that the Liberals did not seek to check with the companies it named in its ads as shedding jobs because of union activity. Once The Age revealed that the firms were nervous about being Exhibit A in a very political game, Doyle's decision to press ahead indicated the Liberals had reached a point of no return.

This final week began badly for Mr Doyle. The Sunday Age made it five polls in six days suggesting a Labor landslide, and it was this day that the Liberals went into panic mode.

Mr Doyle launched his industrial relations offensive during an interview with Channel Nine's Laurie Oakes last Sunday, then held a doorstop in front of a St Kilda Road construction site clutching 3000 pages of transcripts from the Cole building industry royal commission.

When the media at first largely ignored the new push, the Liberals wheeled out the controversial advertisements and dropped all pretence of policy announcements to bang the anti-union drum loud and long. Simultaneously, Mr Doyle started warning of a Labor landslide, and the media picked up that he was now campaigning intensively in previously safe Liberal seats such as Prahran.

In the absence of any other activity from the Liberals, the media was obliged eventually to give industrial relations some exposure - although it still largely failed to penetrate the vital evening television news bulletins.

All the while, Steve Bracks has been trying to bury expectations of a landslide, which first gained momentum with successive devastating survey figures in the Saturday Herald Sun and The Sunday Age last week.

Labor's better-resourced campaign was reflected both in the quality of its advertising and its strategic use of human resources. Labor used Premier Bracks almost exclusively as a conduit for good news, burnishing his "nice guy" image. When the Liberals needed to be attacked on the evening news, Treasurer Brumby was brought out as Labor's "bad cop".

After the demise of Dr Dean, Mr Doyle suffered from carrying a Herculean workload. As both the bearer of good news policy releases, and the face of the party's industrial relations campaign, Mr Doyle's media image has been blurred.

While the Liberals have made progress on industrial relations, Mr Brumby's smooth lines and the Dean fiasco ensured that budgetary management has never really cut through as an issue with the media.

The wives of the leaders have played interesting roles. Terry Bracks has been seen consistently at her husband's side, while Jenny Doyle moved reluctantly into the campaign in the final week as the Liberals sought to depict Mr Doyle with a softer focus.

While not usually deciding many votes, Labor picked up a clean sweep of editorial endorsements from the newspapers.

This was a first for the conservative Herald Sun. But the paper splashed with a damaging front-page industrial relations story that did the government no favours at all and gave Mr Doyle just the hint of a late and badly needed upswing.

Stephen Mayne, publisher of crikey.com.au, was a press secretary to Jeff Kennett during the 1990s.